ABSTRACT
Precarious work has been growing in the last 30 years in most advanced political economies and the phenomenon has been widely debated among academics and policy-makers. After providing data on its growth and diffusion across countries, this chapter discusses its causes, from labour market deregulation to tertiarisation and changing workforce composition. It then presents the implications of precarious work for the individual, the organisation and wider society, suggesting policies and initiatives to address the main challenges based on evidence from different countries and organisations; these include minimum wages, union campaigns to organise precarious workers and bargain on their behalf, and ILO conventions. The chapter concludes by discussing the need to update traditional theories on dual labour markets because they suggest a clear separation between core standard workers and peripheral workers, which is contradicted by the diffusion of precarious work across skill levels, sectors and occupations.
